HAVANA — Fidel Castro marked his 85th birthday outside of the public spotlight Saturday, with little fanfare around the aging revolutionary icon who is rarely seen in public these days but still casts a long shadow over Cuban society.

There were no announced celebrations of Castro's birthday, though the previous night two dozen musical acts from across Latin America held a concert in his honor.

"What we say in the songs of our invited artists will be little next to what he deserves," Alfredo Vera, one of the organizers, said late Friday. "Congratulations, beloved and eternal comandante."

The former president didn't make it to his own birthday bash — hardly a surprise since he appears infrequently since he stepped down in 2006, at first temporarily, and then permanently in 2008, due an intestinal illness that he later said nearly killed him.

Nor did his younger brother and presidential successor Raul Castro attend. Instead, first Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, who also delivered the keynote address on Revolution Day July 26, was the highest ranking among several government officials in the presidential seats at Karl Marx Theater.

A gregarious public speaker as president, Castro is seen publicly these days in official still photographs and video footage, such as recent images showing him with Raul and a convalescing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

'He's not going to have an epiphany'
Castro seemed unsteady on his feet when he made a surprise showing at a Communist Party Congress in April, walking to his seat with the help of an aide. It was at that same gathering that the party for the first time named a leadership council without him on it, as Fidel left his last official position.

Yet even in retirement, Castro has continued to be a player on the island. Raul has said he consults with his older brother, and some Cuba-watchers say his presence has acted as a brake on reforms that Raul is betting will save the island's economy by loosening some state control.

"I think the issue is how long (Fidel) is going to linger on and how long he's going to meddle in the government," said Ann Louise Bardach, a longtime Cuba watcher and "Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington."

"As long as he is alive and he is compos mentis, he's not going to change his thinking," Bardach said. "He's not going to have an epiphany about economic policy. He's going to do what he always did, which is the preservation of the revolution at all costs."

Castro has publicly backed Raul's reforms, however, even though he expressed ideological dislike for similar openings while president.

"People used to worry about what would happen if Fidel died, but now it's Raul. Raul replaced Fidel, but who will replace Raul?" mechanic Rafa Marrero said.

Hiatus
In retirement, Castro has been a prolific writer of newspaper columns and a series of books, including autobiographical accounts of the events that led him to take power after the 1959 revolution.

"Nobody better than he understands the basic, primordial part of our history," official biographer Katuska Blanco said in an interview aired Friday on state TV. "He also has always said that history is made by leaders and the people."

Castro is currently on a hiatus from the opinion pieces, publishing just one column since late May, though it's not unusual or unprecedented for his pen to go silent for extended periods.

Omara Portuondo, the Grammy-winning singer of Buena Vista Social Club fame, was the headliner for Friday night's show, dubbed the "Serenade of Fidelity."

But the real star was the absent Fidel, whose defiance of the United Sates continues to inspire leftist movements around the world.

"Tonight in Havana ... we pay homage to the brother of humanity, our friend, the friend of all, comandante Fidel Castro, as he hits 85 years of fruitful life," Vera said.

Fidel Castro came to power on New Year's Day 1959 when his guerrilla forces swept down from the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains to topple U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

As Cuba's president, he outlasted nine U.S. presidents and five decades of U.S. hostility.

The three Castro brothers in 1941 from left to right: Fidel, Raul, and Ramon. Castro named his younger brother Raul his temporary successor on July, 31, 2006, after undergoing intestinal surgery. It marked the first time that Castro had relinquished power in 47 years of rule.
(Council of State Photo Archive)
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Castro took up arms against the Cuban regime of President Fulgencio Batista for the first time unsuccessfully in 1953. Hoping to spark a popular revolt, Castro led more than 100 followers in a failed attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. He survived the attack, but was imprisoned for two years. After receiving amnesty he went to Mexico where he was detained by Mexican immigration authorities for training troops for another uprising in Cuba. He is shown here resting on his cot in December 1956 in a Mexico City jail. He was released shortly after this picture was taken and continued his fight against Batista.
(Bettmann via Corbis)
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Castro is cheered by a village crowd on his victorious march into Havana in January 1959 after revolutionary forces seized control of Cuba.
(Grey Villet / Time & Life Pictures via Getty Images)
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Castro and his Marxist revolutionary ally, Che Guevara, try their hand at golf in 1959 after seizing power in the Cuban Revolution.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Castro and the American novelist Ernest Hemingway in Havana in 1959. Hemingway spent many years in Cuba and his novella “The Old Man and the Sea,” for which he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, centers on an aging Cuban fisherman. After the Cuban Revolution, Hemingway was forced to flee Cuba and return to Ketchum, Idaho where he lived out the last years of his life.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Fidel Castro talks with Ed Sullivan, television variety show host and N.Y. Daily News columnist, January 6, 1959, days after the Cuban revolution ousted the Batista regime. The United States was the first nation to recognize Castro as Cuba's leader, but his radical economic reforms quickly rattled American leaders.
(Harold Valentine / AP)
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Castro visits the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1959. Castro visited the U.S. in April of 1959 as part of a charm offensive for his new government, but was refused a meeting with President Eisenhower.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Castro and Ricardo Alarcón on national TV on April 9, 1961, a few days before the failed U.S. invasion of Cuba on April 15, 1961 known as the Bay of Pigs. Alarcón, head of the Cuban parliament since 1993, is still a close Castro confidante and his main point person on U.S. relations.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Cuban Revolution leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara shown during a meeting Havana in the early '60s. Castro declared his revolution to be a socialist movement on April 16, 1961. The failed U.S. invasion of Cuba, known as the Bay of Pigs, happened the next day, on April 17, 1961.
(AFP - Getty Images)
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Castro sits inside a tank near Playa Giron, Cuba, during the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. About 1,500 Cuban exiles, supported by the CIA, landed in Cuba in the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961 with the purpose of sparking a popular uprising and ousting Castro's government. Most rebels were quickly captured or killed by the Cuban armed forces, marking a major defeat in the U.S. effort to dislodge Castro from power.
(Raul Corrales / AP)
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Castro learning to ski during a trip to Russia in 1962. The Soviet Union was a major source of military and economic aid for Cuba until its collapse in 1991.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Prime Minister Fidel Castro gives a radio and televised speech on Oct. 22, 1962 during which he talked about the measures taken by the United States regarding Cuba and the annoucement by President John F. Kennedy of a U.S. blockade of the island. The tense 13-day standoff over Soviet nuclear-armed missile installed on the island, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war. It was resolved after Nikita Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles.
(Keystone-France via Getty Images)
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Castro holds the hand of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during an official visit to Moscow in May 1963. Taking advantage of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Cuba relied on billions of dollars in Soviet subsidies for decades. The disappearance of Soviet aid after the collapse of the Soviet Union created hard times in Cuba known as the "Special Period" because of the tight rationing of food, fuel, and consumer goods.
(AFP - Getty Images)
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Castro, a star pitcher at the University of Havana and longtime baseball fan, gets set to fire a ball as he pitches for Camaguey Province against Pinar Del Rio Province at Cuba's Veradero Beach in July 1964.
(AP)
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Castro, once a passionate cigar smoker, is seen here exhaling cigar smoke during an interview in March, 1985 at his presidential palace in Havana. He gave up the habit in 1986 citing health concerns. Cuba has long been known as the world's foremost producer of cigars and the industry generates over $200 million annually for the country's economy. Bans on smoking in public places were introduced in Cuba in 2005.
(Charles Tasnadi / AP)
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Castro took to the streets of Havana during the Aug. 5, 1994 riots, the largest anti-government riots since he had assumed power, that sparked the rafters crisis. Five years after the fall of the Soviet Union the Cuban economy was in disarray and tens of thousands of Cubans cast out in homemade rafts to make the risky journey to the U.S. creating a migration crisis.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Castro visiting the Great Wall of China during a state visit in December, 1995. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba looked towards China more as a Communist ally.
(Cuban Council of State Photo Archive)
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Pope John Paul II shakes hands with Castro at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana on Jan. 21, 1998 after the Pope arrived for his landmark visit to the communist nation.
(Michel Gangne / AFP - Getty Images)
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Castro talks with Elian Gonzalez during the inauguration of the "Museo a la Batalla de Ideas" in Cardenas, Cuba on July 14, 2001.

Gonzalez was aboard an overcrowded motorboat that capsized en route from Cuba to Florida, killing his mother and others seeking to enter the United States illegally. He was rescued off Florida on Nov. 25, 1999, and then was at the center of a seven-month custody tug-of-war that culminated in US federal agents seizing him by force from Miami-based relatives.
(Adalberto Roque / AFP - Getty Images)
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Former South African President Nelson Mandela and Cuban leader Fidel Castro embrace during a visit by Castro on Sept. 2, 2001 in Johannesburg, South Africa where the two leaders were participating in the World Conference Against Racism. In power since the Cuban revolution in January 1959, Castro was one of the world's longest ruling leaders. Only Queen Elizabeth, crowned in 1952, has been head of state longer.
(Jose Goitia / AP)
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Cuban President Fidel Castro and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter talk after a friendly game of baseball at the Latinoamericano Stadium on May 14, 2002 in Havana, Cuba. This is the first visit by a former or sitting U.S. President since Castro came to power in 1959.
(Jorge Rey / Getty Images)
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Castro speaks with his brother Raul Castro during a meeting of the Cuban Parliament during December 2003.

Raul Castro, who has been running Cuba since his brother Fidel was sidelined by illness in 2006, became his official successor in February 2008.
(Adalberto Roque / AFP - Getty Images)
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Two women hold up the latest edition of Granma newspaper bearing the headline "Message from the Commander in Chief," on Feb. 19, 2008, in Havana. Castro stepped down that morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness, according to Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party.
(Jose Goitia / Redux Pictures)
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Fidel Castro is seen on June 18, 2008 in Havana during a meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, left, and his brother Cuban President Raul Castro, right. Castro, 81, has not been seen in public since he fell during an appearance in July 2006, but the state-run media occassionally releases official photos of the ailing former leader.
(Estudios Revolucion / AFP - Getty Images)
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Fidel Castro speaks during a meeting with students at Havana's University on Sept. 3, 2010. Castro warned of the dangers of nuclear war in his first speech to the Cuban public since falling ill in 2006.
(Desmond Boylan / Reuters)
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Fidel Castro makes a surprise appearance at the 6th Communist Party Congress in Havana, Cuba, on April 19, 2011. Raul Castro, right, was named first secretary of Cuba's Communist Party, with his aging brother Fidel not included in the leadership for the first time since the party's creation.
(Javier Galeano / AP)
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Castro looks at the camera during a rare public appearance to attend the inauguration of an art gallery on Jan. 8, 2014 in Havana. The gallery Castro visited is run by Cuban artist Alexis Leyva, aka Kcho.
(Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo via Getty Images)
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Castro speaks with China's President Xi Jinping in Havana, on July 22, 2014. Xi Jinping said that his state visit to Cuba is aimed at carrying forward the traditional friendship between the two countries jointly built by Castro and the older generations of Chinese leaders, so as to inject new impetus into bilateral cooperation.
(Alex Castro / AP)
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Editor's note:
This image contains graphic content that some viewers may find disturbing.